Loose leaves

Poetry in motion, in hospitals, in every countyPoets bilocating in various parts of Ireland and popping up everywhere – even in hospitals – will be the order of the day on All-Ireland Poetry Day, next Thursday. Now in its fourth year, it's all about reinforcing the fact that poetry is one of our most vital art forms.

At Waterford Regional Hospital patients and staff will receive newly commissioned poems by Pat Boran, Michael Coady, Martina Evans, Kerrie Hardie, James Harpur, Mary O’Donnell, Myra Schneider and Grace Wells in an anthology edited by Mark Roper. There will also be a public poetry reading in the hospital’s church at lunchtime.

The anthology will be given out in lots of other hospitals, including Bantry General and community hospitals in Castletown Bere, Clonakilty, Dunmanway, Skibbereen and Schull. Many patients will identify especially with Wells's poem I Packed My Bag, where, along with "the things specified on their list: dressing-gown and slippers, toothbrush and paste", the poet adds a few things of her own. "There would be hours of waiting / and sometimes they would take my dignity, / so I put in endurance, and a smile for a stranger, / and an acre of meadow in soft rain."

In Dublin Enda Wyley (above), a number of whose poems were inspired by giving birth in the Coombe Women Infants University Hospital, will read there from 1pm to 2pm.

“When we first met Dr Chris Fitzpatrick in the Coombe, I was nearly three months pregnant. As the chat progressed, he asked my husband an unusual question. Was he, by any chance, the poet Peter Sirr? It had nothing to do with babies or birth dates or scans, and we both were surprised and found the change of subject a refreshing one. Peter nodded in reply. And so began a conversation about poetry and books which happily lasted between the three of us all the way through my pregnancy,” says Wyley, infectiously excited at the idea of people encountering poems in the endless corridors of a hospital.

Dublin Unesco City of Literature will mark the day with Bringing It All Back Home, in which writers associated with the capital – including Rita Ann Higgins and Gerard Smyth – will celebrate their own genius loci by revisiting a place of significance to them.

Paula Meehan will read in both Mayo and Sligo, while in Wicklow Nuala Ní Dhomhnaíll will give a bilingual reading at the Courthouse Arts Centre, in Tinahely.

There’s even a poetry reading at Dublin airport, with Michael O’Loughlin at Pier D, in Terminal 1, at 2.30 pm. This is especially innovative; anything that takes the Homeland Security aspect out of air travel is hugely welcome.

Higgins will also launch a new poetry competition in association with Trócaire. Open to adults and children, it has a deadline for submissions of November 11th; poetryireland.ie/poetryday.

Ciaran Berry picks up first Michael Murphy Prize

Ciaran Berry is the first winner of the Michael Murphy Prize for his collection The Sphere of Birds. The prize, in honour of the poet Michael Murphy, who died of a brain tumour in 2009, was established by his former colleagues at Nottingham Trent University in partnership with the English Association, and is for a first volume of poetry in English published in Britain or Ireland. The Sphere of Birdscame out from the Gallery Press in 2008.

Born in Dublin in 1971, Berry now lives in Connecticut and teaches at Trinity College in Hartford. “Berry is,” say the judges, “already a poised and mature lyric poet with a clear grasp of how a meticulous technique can be used to explore complex subjects.”

In 2001 Murphy was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize by the Poetry Society as New Poet of the Year. The idea behind this new prize, which will be awarded every other year, is to give the same recognition to another new poet.